The telecommunications industry presently offers a wide variety of telephony services to customers via telecommunications networks, providing wired or wireless access. In a fundamental role, the telecommunications networks interconnect one calling station to one or more called stations. In implementing this interconnection, a calling station places a call via a communications channel (e.g., a data channel) through one or more central office switches. The data channel carries signaling information identifying the calling number, the called number, toll charge, etc. The central office switch routes the data in accordance with this information to the called station and establishes a voice channel. In the process, both a data channel and a voice channel are employed to make and hold the connection. Once the voice channel is established, there is usually no longer a necessity to maintain the data channel.
Presently, when a calling station has completed a call, the above process is repeated again. Placing another call, however, may create a hazard if the calling station is a cellular telephone being used in an automobile. Furthermore, the calling station may have difficulty in connecting again to a central office switch when making another call.
Additionally, in the past when the telecommunications networks had adequate bandwidth and the data and voice channels were of the same type, the channels remained connected during the course of a communications session. In addition to using bandwidth, maintaining the data channel connection during a communications session created an unnecessary usage fee from a telephone company. Furthermore, telecommunications demand has increased at a tremendous rate over the last decade with an increase in communication devices and services such as facsimiles, pagers, cellular phones, personal computers, Internet access, high speed modems, etc. Thus, the luxury of being able to maintain the connectivity of the data channels, which may also be voice capable, during a voice call has been superseded by a need to use those channels for other purposes as soon as the voice channel has been established for a particular communication session.
Releasing a channel, such as the data channel, during a communications session is commonly referred to as a release link or release link technology. The release link technology has been implemented in the past with analog and T1 carriers in connection with local private branch exchanges. Due to advances in speech recognition systems, speech recognition may now be used to support telephony services such as call placing, directory assistance, conference calling, voice fax and voice mail.
Release link technology, however, is a feature that is typically purchased from the switch manufacturer and added to the central office switch. The addition of the release link technology may be cost prohibitive depending on various factors including the switch manufacturer. In addition to the cost, implementing the release link technology to a central office switch may be a time consuming endeavor. Furthermore, there are some central office switches that do not have the capability of even accepting or using the release link technology. The added cost and time in addition to the type of switch, therefore, may prevent a customer from installing a telephony system, such as one including speech recognition technology, that incorporates release link technology.
Accordingly, what is needed in the art is an apparatus and method that implements a release link technology in a multitude of switches or environments and provides a reusable voice channel, particularly, in association with a telephony system employing speech recognition technology.